The past month I have spent every weekend with sawdust in my hair, inside my bra,in my nose, ears, cracks and grooves. All because we finally started sanding our floors. We have hardwood floors in every room besides our kitchen, laundry room and upstairs bathroom. That is a lot of square footage. A lot of time on my knees. A lot of muscle work and lot of swear words.
Our half-bath has hardwood floors but it is in such bad condition that we are laying the same type of floor through our laundry room, kitchen and half bath. It just made sense and the floor we bought is gorgeous so I wasn't too mad about it.
We rented a floor oscillator/orbital sander (literally everyone calls it something different) from Ace along with the edge sander which is a thing from Jesus himself. That edger made sanding all the rooms around the edges go so fast and saved us a ton of time. You have to be very careful with it as it eats the floor. So very easily can you end up with a divot in the floors. This helped us doing hallways and the landings of our staircase as our stairs are original hardwood as well.
The oscillator was wonderful and we started out with 20 grit slowly working our way up to 100. It took SO MUCH TIME. The edger was nice because it takes the wood down to its original state which helped us see how much further we needed to go with the oscillator. The floors downstairs are oak which means they are a harder floor and the dents and such come off easier, but is harder to sand down. The floors upstairs are pine and are a softer wood. The pine is easier to sand down but the stains sink into the wood a lot further therefore we aren't able to get out all the stains and scratches.
We know our floors wont be perfect since the wood is 100 years old, and were fine with that. We were going to stain them but didn't feel too confident doing such large areas. I feared they would turn out worse then what they were. We chose to just varnish and let the wood age over time. My parents did this to their floors and has turned out to be a nice light color. While I prefer a darker color to offset all my white and neutral wall colors I decided I would rather put up with the light wood over an uneven stain job.
WE WILL BE FINISHED THIS WEEKEND! Hallelujah. We will be finished sanding and will start the varnishing process. We ordered carpet and furniture and set up the carpet install for the second week in January-if you remember we need carpet in the back part of that living room so our living room has to be varnished by then. Check back for the finished product otherwise check out what we've done so far here or take a look above.